Top Telephone Interview Tips

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Why Telephone Job Interviews Are Popular

Telephone job interviews are becoming increasingly popular with more and more companies looking for new ways to cut down on administrative costs. The thing that most employers are doing with the phone screen is they are trying to decide if it’s worthwhile to bring you into the office for a face-to-face interview because that ties up anywhere from one to four hours of their time and/or their staff’s time and so they try to understand if there is enough reason to bring you in, in the phone interview.

Look, the telephone interview is not intended to get the job for you. It’s intended to weed out candidates from the pool that the company is considering hiring. You’re not going to win the job with a great performance but you can lose a job with a poor performance, your goal is simply avoid being eliminated from competition and consideration. Knowing this, you should provide just enough information in your responses to whet their appetite and want to learn more about you and how you can contribute to their organization.

Prepare For Your Job Interview Over The Phone

Unfortunately, many people don’t react that well to phone interviews. In fact this is an area that a lot of people struggle with. I think the main key is that they tend not to prepare near as much for a phone interview as they do as an in-person interview and whereas you should prepare as much at this stage as any other stage in the interview process.

Take Notes

One great thing is to take notes. Make sure that you’ve got some notes in front of you, make sure you’ve got a notebook, in fact, so that if there is something that you can’t quite work out what it is that they are asking, you’ve got time to actually write it down. After the job interview these notes will be vital in helping you craft a follow up letter thanking the interviewer for the consideration and referencing what was said. It will help the interviewer remember who you are from the many candidates interviewed.

Pardon, I Can’t Hear You

Always try and be interviewed on a landline, not on a mobile. B, make sure that when they’re talking to you and they will, it will probably vary probably, I’ve told you that they will call you x time, that you are on a landline and you are in a quiet place. Don’t take interviews on mobile phones in bars. Disaster.

Don’t use a low-quality phone. Imagine wandering around the house perhaps, with your cell phone, where the reception is coming and going. It won’t leave a good impression.

Get Your Head In The Game

Shower, groom and dress. The psychological impact of being properly dressed is really very important. How you feel will be heard really over the interview and it will give you that added advantage that you do need because this interview is as important as a face-to-face might be.

Don’t Ramble

Now, also in a phone interview, be careful about giving long-winded answers that answer other questions. The more you talk, the less you can sound like you know what you’re saying. When you are confident, you don’t need to draw it out. Remember, it’s a phone conversation, a conversation, so don’t interrupt the interviewer before they finish asking the question or speaking. That’s rude and disrespectful and it may appear that you’re too well-rehearsed.

Recognizing the purpose of the telephone interview is to remain in consideration and to secure a face-to-face interview, you can only hurt your chances for consideration if you drone on too long with just long-winded answers. You face two risks with these long, drawn out answers. First, you might say something that raises a red flag with the interviewer. The more you talk, the greater the potential that you’ll say something they don’t agree with or that makes them concerned, so your answers should be brief and to the point, not long and drawn out.

Research Websites

With today’s internet age, there’s no excuse not to check out an employer’s website. If you are wanting to commit to an employer is it worth at least checking their website out. Try to do some searches on them on the web. Get some information about them. It may not even come up in this stage of the interview but you never know when you might have that chance to drop some information that shows that you did your homework. And a lot of managers will ask to see if you have checked out their website and know much about their company because that would be a pretty good indication of your level of interest.